Sunnyvale, Calif.-based ShoreTel Inc. announced today that it is acquiring Corvisa LLC, a Milwaukee-based cloud communications firm, from Kansas City, Mo.-based Novation Companies Inc.
ShoreTel said it will pay $8.5 million in cash to acquire Corvisa. The deal is expected to close in a couple of weeks.
“What attracted us (to acquire Corvisa) was the technology, as well as the talent,” said Don Joos, president and chief executive officer of ShoreTel.
As part of the deal, 94 Corvisa employees will join ShoreTel. Most of those employees are located at the Corvisa corporate headquarters at the Schlitz Park office complex near downtown Milwaukee.
“This office is going to continue to be here,” said Joos, speaking from the Milwaukee office today.
Last year, Corvisa nearly doubled its office space in the Schlitz Park complex, to 35,000 square feet, and added about 100 jobs companywide. Earlier this year the company had approximately 200 employees, more than 100 of whom were based in Milwaukee. Also earlier this year, the company acquired Codebox.
ShoreTel is a provider of IP Phone systems and unified communications solutions for businesses. The firm does business all over the world. Its headquarters are in Silicon Valley. Besides the headquarters, its largest technical offices are in Austin, Texas and in Bangalore, India. The Milwaukee office will be its next largest technical office, after those three, Joos said.
“We are delighted to be joining ShoreTel,” Matt Lautz, chief executive officer of Corvisa, said in a statement. “ShoreTel has global reach, is able to scale for all business communication needs and has shown a strong track record of growth. We believe Corvisa’s cloud contact center coupled with ShoreTel’s go-to-market expertise in this area creates a compelling combination.”
“The acquisition of Corvisa aligns tightly with our strategic plan and acquisition priorities. We are in our acceleration phase of our strategic plan, focused on accelerating technology time to market, growing hosted revenue, and expanding our cloud offering globally,” Joos said in a statement. “Corvisa’s technology and engineering resources are very complementary to ShoreTel. I’m excited about the robust API’s to accelerate application integration and the addition-al growth that an expanded cloud contact center will bring.”
Shares of ShoreTel trade on the NASDAQ exchange under the ticker symbol SHOR.
